Today, I used scissors to cut up 250 squares and a few Valentine's Day hearts. Then just now during my lunch time, I came across this verse in one of the 1001 stories from The Arabian Nights:
Albe to lover adverse be his love,
And show aversion howso may he care;
Yet will I manage that their persons meet,
E'en as the pivot of a scissor-pair
And that made me wonder, when were scissors invented? Was that analogy of two lovers meeting like scissor blades an anachronistic translation by Sir Richard Burton? Not in the least: according to Wikipedia, the oldest pair of scissors was found in the Middle East, dated around 1500 years before Christ! However, the pivoting cross-blade kind of scissors that we use today, referenced in that verse above, was not invented until 100 AD by the Romans. Still not anywhere near an anachronism!
I'm finally getting into these Arabian Nights stories. The one I'm currently reading is pretty interesting, about two impossibly beautiful people who fall in love, then lose sight of each other and go mad as a result, only no one realizes they are smitten by love, not by insanity. (Or maybe they are one and the same, as the story seems to imply) A third party comes into the picture and figures out the root of the problem, and goes about his work, bringing the two lovers together like “the pivot of a scissor-pair”.
From reading these stories, I gather that a long long time ago in the Middle East, when people were depressed, instead of drowning their sorrows in alcohol and eat whole tubs of Ben & Jerry's, they wept and wailed and recited verses, using words like “smite”, which I figured out by context means “to strike”. For example:
“I smote his ruin upon the mountainside” (LOTR- Gandalf the Grey). Heehee! I love that line.
Or, instead of “love-struck” you can just say that you are “smitten”.
It was written that a kitten
Was smitten with a mitten
'Til it was bitten
By the mitten
Which was smitten by the kitten
To this day, kittens love to smite balls of yarn, which remind them of that mitten that bit'em.
I had a lot of fun today, teaching my kids about Valentine's Day. “Who do you love?” For some reason, everyone loved Shene. She is a very fun girl, I'll give her that! Then I learned that my 2nd graders got top marks on their most recent exam!
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